


Totally Pretend

by boundbyspells



Category: How I Met Your Mother
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-11-14
Updated: 2007-11-14
Packaged: 2017-10-26 05:34:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/279299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boundbyspells/pseuds/boundbyspells
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one else knows even half of what went on when Barney and Lily were living together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Totally Pretend

**Author's Note:**

> I wish to thank my betaful beta, [](http://splash-the-cat.livejournal.com/profile)[**splash_the_cat**](http://splash-the-cat.livejournal.com/). Spoilers: through early S2, "The World's Greatest Couple"

Sometimes, or maybe it's most of the time now, Lily thinks about what it would be like to be married to Barney. It's hard not to: she's intermittently pretending to be married to Barney, and she's _supposed_ to be married to Marshall right now. It’s a weird thing not to be Mrs. Someone You Expected To Be. It’s even weirder to be Mrs. Not-Stinson.

Plus, she hasn’t had sex in like five months. Every time she closes her eyes, Lily can only see the way Barney looked when he got out of the shower that one time and she was sitting on the toilet--whoops!--too sleepy and too urgently needing to pee to bother with waiting. Barney had stared at her and she had stared at him, and he hadn't grabbed a towel, he'd just stood there with water droplets sliding down his chest, and she'd just sat there, peering up through her hair, undies down around her ankles. "Uhm," she'd said at last. "Sorry?" And he'd then grabbed a towel and pulled it over his head and started toweling his hair, and she'd finished and pulled up her undies in record time and beat a hasty retreat to put on some pants.

Yep. This is a pretty weird place to be. Lily has marriage on the brain and Barney on her mind, and it’s getting all tangled up.

Like the night after the Letterman monologue, when they'd fallen asleep and woken up cuddling. When they told the story to Ted and Robin, they'd made it sound like they'd both jumped right out of bed, that Barney had gone insane with commitmentphobia, and that Lily had moved out that very day. But that's not what happened.

What actually happened was that when Lily woke wrapped up in Barney, they hadn't jerked apart. He'd still been mostly asleep. And he'd nuzzled her neck a little, and chills had gone up her spine. And he'd reached out and stroked her hair, and it had felt _so nice_.

And she was so amazed and thrilled, so suddenly happy that someone other than Marshall could make chills go up her spine, that she just lay there, letting him touch her. Sleepwalk sex, it seemed like, for a while, and it wasn't until he'd spun her around in his arms and was kissing her that she realized, "Oh, God, this is _Barney_." It was _weird_. His head felt smaller than Marshall's, for one thing. Which was a bizarre thought--but his head _was_ smaller, and when she reached up to touch his face, she could feel the way the bones beneath his skin were sharper, more fragile-seeming, and she wondered if that was supposed to be turning her off and not on, but it _was_ turning her on, and he smelled so good, and his skin and lips tasted so good, and--and so not Marshall.

She'd pulled away from him then, gasping, cursing, scrambling out of bed, and he was doing the same. They just stared at each other for a while, and it was like in the bathroom again, only more problematic.

Lily went to pee then, and by the time she returned, Barney had a shirt on again, so Lily made breakfast, and Barney ate it, until Barney said, very quietly, "I'm having a real problem, here, Lily."

"Yeah."

"We redecorated my place. We stayed in on a Friday night to watch Letterman. And then slept together and didn’t have sex. Are we--are we in a relationship?" He looked like he really didn't know.

"So that’s what you think a relationship is?"

He frowned and didn't answer.

And Lily didn't move out that day, and Barney didn't freak out that day, and they both just sort of went on with life for a bit. Barney went to work, and Lily went on being differently-employed (as in "un"), and all that day, Lily found herself staring into space and imagining all kinds of hot, dirty sex with Barney, but also, being married to him. And that's how it's gone for the past week, too.

And it's all tangled up in her head, tangled like the spaghetti she's making for dinner, tangled like her legs with Barney's legs while they kissed that morning. Tangled with the scent of Barney's shaving soap, tangled with the way she's never been so broke in her entire life and is really, really glad not to be eating ramen that she cooked on her refrigerator. Is that it, though? Is it because of security or safety that Barney-in-twenty-years is living in her head right now, with great laugh lines around his eyes and a head full of graying hair? Because if it's just security, well, that's really cheap.

But it's not security. Maybe a little, but mostly not. And it's not even that Barney is going to age really well, probably way better than Marshall.

The problem is, it's not even any of the shallow things that are making Lily think about a future that just can't happen. And it's not the Marshall-pain -- that dull toothache feeling through her abdomen that is obviously related to Marshall because it escalates to a sharp toothache feeling whenever she hears his name -- that's making Lily think about it, either -- no, really, she's thought about that, and it's not.

It's that she kinda loves Barney. Kinda. She's kinda loved Barney for a while now, though she didn’t know it until he flew to San Francisco and told her to come back to New York, though until now she would have said it was totally that same kind of friend-love that she has for Ted. But seriously, when you friend-love someone who's kinda super hot, and suddenly the reasons you weren't ever, ever, _ever_ fantasizing about them are gone, how do you keep the friend-love the friend-love? _How_?

Somehow, another dinner passes between them, and they aren't talking about anything real, ever. He's making the same jokes, talking the same talk, and it's Barney-as-usual. It almost makes things normal. Almost. Except Barney doesn't meet her eyes much, and Barney isn't going out at night anymore.

Tonight, she thinks. Tonight, I'm going to go talk to him.

But she doesn't.

They get through spaghetti and tacos and beef bourguignon and pancakes-for-dinner before she screws up her nerve. She's wearing flannel jammies and feeling particularly unlovely, so she's thinking it's a good time to have a serious talk with Barney. She waits until he's in his bedroom, watching TV -- it's hard to miss when he's watching TV in his bedroom, as the glow flicks out beneath his door like there's a lightning-storm in the other room -- and knocks and enters, because she's not going to give him a chance to tell her not to enter.

The door opens onto the hills of Austria and the beaming face of Mary Poppins in a nun costume spread across the TV screen, six times larger than life. The sound is down low, but there's no doubt that there's a problem like Maria in this bedroom.

This in and of itself is confusing to Lily--but, wait, where are Barney's hands?

"Barney, are you _masturbating_ to _The Sound of Music_?" Lily asks. Asks. Screams. Squawks, really.

"No! I'm most emphatically not!" Barney says, and he whips his hands out from beneath the covers, leaving behind a tent-stand in the duvet.

"You were! You _are_!"

"Lily..." Barney say threateningly.

"Barney! She's a _nun_!"

"Lily..." Barney is not enjoying this as much as she is. He's got the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, and he's pinching determinedly. "Take pity on me, Lil. Disappear."

But disappearing is the furthest thing from her mind. She climbs into bed next to him. "Oh, I'll take pity on you," she says, slipping her hand between his thighs.

"Nice euphemism, Aldrin," he sneers, until she slides her hands further up--then he gasps and doesn't say anything at all. And that's nice, because she was altogether afraid he was going to stop her, or say something that would ruin it.

But he doesn't ruin it.

In fact, he doesn't ruin it three times for her, before indulging in a little controlled demolition for himself.

Later, when they lie together in the after-non-ruin, drifting to sleep while the Von Trapps escape the Nazis, Lily decides to pretend, for just a little while, that this is merely the beginning.

It's totally pretend, though.

Really.


End file.
